To put this in perspective: When Mike talks about this stuff, he's coming from a position of "This is serious business. The point of my job is to make this run

To put this in perspective: When Mike talks about this stuff, he's coming from a position of "This is serious business. The point of my job is to make this run 10,000 times in 0.1 milliseconds. It can be done. It's not that hard. Why are you screwing up simple stuff like this?" The code he was reviewing was inner-inner-inner-loop, performance critical logic. That stuff doesn't always spring fully-formed from the standard library. Sometimes you have to write it yourself. When its your turn, it would be worth heeding the advice of someone like Mike -who has spent a good part of his career figuring out how to do it well. As for the arrogance... I've seem Mike speak live on this topic. He hams-up the attitude because it gets a reaction from the audience. He's trying to irritate you into improving yourself. To his discredit, very little of what he is complaining about has much to do with C++.